Is the perched 'Ivory-bill' actually just some out-of-focus vegetation?

Ok, this is very interesting to me. In Cornell's paper, Cornell suggests that a distant black-and-white blob is an Ivory-billed Woodpecker. I've reviewed the Luneau DVD yet again, and I think that the blob is more likely to be just some out-of-focus vegetation. I'm talking specifically about the blob pictured in Figure S5, on page 9 of Cornell's Supporting Online Materials--this is supposed to be a distant Ivory-bill perched on a tree, seen on the video about 20 seconds before the "Ivory-bill" begins flying from that general area.

Here's why I say that: I carefully watched the video at 1/8 speed and kept my attention on the right side of the video (at around the 49 second mark, the bird flies from the extreme left of the screen). Over on the right side, as the video proceeds, I can see several black-and-white blobs that look very much like the "Ivory-bill" that Cornell sees on the left side. As the canoe proceeds forward, the blobs form and disappear as leaves in the foreground align with tree trunks in the background, etc.

When the tree where the "Ivory-bill" was perched was later inspected, no black-and-white mark was found. That makes sense to me--in my opinion, the black-and-white blobs on the video are not accurate views of anything on the trees themselves; rather, they are just artifacts of an unfocused camera.

Notes on finding Ivory-bills

Tanner's "The Ivory-billed Woodpecker" contains some interesting information about finding Ivory-bills. From page 22:
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...Early morning is the best time of day to look for Ivory-bills as the birds are more active then, moving more and calling frequently. The most effective way to hunt at that time of day is to move rapidly for about a quarter mile, stop and listen for a minute or more, and move on again, going through the most likely localities and trying to cover much ground while the birds are calling...
All the Ivory-bills I have ever seen I have located first by hearing them call and then going to them. Under good conditions--no wind and few leaves on the trees--the loud call of an Ivory-bill can be heard for almost a quarter of a mile. Sometimes the best way to hunt is to sit still in a good locality and listen for many minutes at a time...
..The birds usually roosted in the same area every night and often in the same hole, and waiting for them to come off the roost in the morning was the best way to find them. Once they had come out of their holes and started off to feed, the task was to keep up with them. They usually traveled in pairs or larger family groups. When they started off on a flight, I would wait a moment, listening to see if they had stopped within earshot. Then I would start after them, usually running as best I could until I believed I was near the birds, when I would stop and listen for a moment. If I heard nothing, I went farther in the same direction, for they usually traveled in a straight line. When I decided that I had missed them somehow, it was time to circle in one direction or another in the hope of finding them again...
Two men working together in the same region can cover the woods more than twice as thoroughly as one man working alone; it is best to have each take half of the area that is to be covered and work at least a half mile apart.
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Again, Tanner's description of the Ivory-bills doesn't match the potential Cache River Ivory-bill reported by Cornell. Remember, they encountered a potential Ivory-bill 8-18 times there, but after a massive search, they said in their paper:
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No observer has positively heard or recorded nasal "kent" notes that are typical of the species.
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Tanner normally encountered pairs of Ivory-bills, but on page 33, he does write about a single male that lived in the Singer Tract for a couple of years. Tanner could routinely relocate this bird, like all the others, by hearing the bird's "kent" notes.

Sub-optimal Ivory-bill habitat in Arkansas?

I've been doing some detailed research on Ivory-billed Woodpecker (IBWO) habitat requirements. In my opinion, it seems that the current habitat in southeast Arkansas is sub-optimal for the IBWO, and it may take ~90 years for more ideal habitat to develop. Please read through the material below and see if you agree...

1. Here's what the late Jim Tanner wrote in "The Ivory-billed Woodpecker", pages 87 and 88:
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...Ivory-bills feed mainly upon the kinds of borers (larvae of Buprestid and Cerambycid beetles) that bore or mine between the bark and sapwood of dead limbs and trees. These larvae are present for only a comparatively short time. They are the first to appear in a tree or limb that has died, usually about a year after death; they are commonest under the bark of wood that has been dead about two years, and then they quickly disappear. Because of its short existence in one place, the food of Ivory-bills is relatively scarce and very irregularly distributed in the forest. An Ivory-bill can find food only in some dead trees or parts of trees, and once these have passed a certain stage of decay, the Ivory-bill can no longer secure food there.

Other kinds of woodpeckers eat borers that mine deep in the decaying sapwood and heartwood of dead trees for from two to ten years after the death of the wood, a much longer period. Therefore, their food is much more common and widespread, and they can live in many kinds of forests. On the other hand, Ivory-bills must live where numbers of trees are constantly dying, so that they can find enough trees or limbs with borers beneath the bark.

Logging the virgin forests removes most of the large, old trees which, indirectly, supply food to woodpeckers. Young trees spring up to take the empty places; but young trees grow rapidly, are healthy, and usually contain little dead wood. For woodpeckers they are not much good. Second-growth forests support far fewer woodpeckers than do primeval forests; for example, in the virgin timber of the Singer Tract, Louisiana, the population of Pileated Woodpeckers was from three to six pairs per square mile, but in the neighboring second growth there was less than one pair per square mile. Even in the warm swamps a tree will grow for about 150 years before it is 'old', so it would take many years of uninterrupted growth for a forest once logged to become again ideal habitat for woodpeckers. In the meantime, these birds would greatly decrease or disappear.

Because of their food habits, Ivory-billed Woodpeckers are more endangered by the cutting of old trees than are other species of woodpeckers. Other kinds can find food in trees in all stages of decay, so their food is much more widespread, and they are able to live in many places where Ivory-bills cannot. Ivory-bills, on the other hand, can find enough food only in places where dead and dying trees are common, which is usually only in old, virgin forests.
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2. Cornell's paper says this about the potential IBWO habitat in Arkansas:
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The present Big Woods landscape consists of patches of mature forest amidst a matrix of regenerating trees of various ages; its resource base for ivory-billed woodpeckers is much reduced compared to that of the Singer Tract...
The Big Woods (fig. S6)—at 220,000 ha, the second-largest contiguous area of bottomland forest in the Mississippi River basin—includes 20 distinct types of swamp and bottomland hardwood forests (16). About 40% of the forest is currently approaching maturity (oldest trees >60 years). The remainder, while younger (20 to 60 years), is growing rapidly. An additional 40,000 ha of adjacent or nearby land has been reforested in the last decade and is in early successional stages. If a few breeding pairs do exist, most of the conditions believed to be required for successful breeding and population growth (5) are becoming more available to them. Strategic additions to the public refuge system and successful restoration efforts by both public and private landowners are reestablishing mature hardwood forest, the crucial foraging habitat for ivory-billed woodpeckers (5). Increasing the extent and diversity of genuinely mature bottomland forest with large, very old trees and substantial standing dead and dying timber may allow future generations to see the awe-inspiring woodpecker again gracing old-growth treetops.
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I would agree that conditions are getting better, but it is a very slow process. The fact that the young trees are growing rapidly is not very helpful--those healthy trees would not be a good food source for Ivory-bills. It looks like many decades need to pass before the current crop of trees will get old enough and decrepit enough to provide good IBWO habitat.

3. Jerome Jackson seemed unimpressed by the potential Ivory-bill habitat in Arkansas. He wrote this about southeast Arkansas on page 158 of "In Search of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker":
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Superficial examination of habitats revealed few areas of extensive, mature bottomland hardwoods, and I discontinued my efforts in the state.
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4. This article by John Fitzpatrick was published in 2002:
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...Whether or not the bird still exists (odds are strongly against it), the ivory-billed story demands our full attention as a vivid symbol of the most comprehensive conservation failure of 20th-century America. By 1900, millions of acres of virgin pine and hardwood still existed in the southeastern United States. Who could have predicted that in our individual, corporate, and public lusts for materials and revenue, we would lack the foresight or collective will to save even a single tract of this primary forest? Quite simply, we cut it all.
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5. Now we have this scene.
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Mike Melnechuk with The Nature Conservancy, uses a lance-like tool to inject a chemical into a tupelo tree, causing it to die, in hopes of creating a more hospitable habitat for the rare ivory-billed woodpecker, Thursday, Aug. 4, 2005, in Benson Creek, near Brinkley, Ark. Scientists are betting that the soon-to-be rotting ash, locust, red maple and tupelo trees will attract the longhorn beetle, the larvae of which are the woodpecker's most favored food.
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Personally, I don't think it's prudent to go off and start killing healthy trees for the IBWO at this point. For one thing, I think it would be a good idea to hold off at least until we have some good photos proving that any IBWOs still survive. After all, if we believe they are alive today, we must also believe they survived and successfully nested for the last 61 years without anyone killing trees on their behalf. Also, of course, any 60-year-old trees we chemically kill today are not going to be part of a potential 'old' forest 90 years from now.
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And of course, an underlying question is: If the Ivory-bill does exist today, what the heck is it doing in Arkansas, rather than Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia, or Texas? On page 246 of his book, Jerome Jackson ranks all those latter states as more likely places than Arkansas for Ivory-bills.

The "best" part of the Luneau video

I've written previously that I think the Luneau video may be the new Rorschach test. John Fitzpatrick of Cornell used the word "crummy" to describe it, and we agree on that point. I don't know the species of the bird in the video.

With all that said, I think the bird is likely to be a normal Pileated Woodpecker. I took a look at the Luneau DVD again today, and I think the video does briefly offer a look at the bird's underwing pattern. This occurs in the first few wingbeats--you may be able to see what I mean by looking at frame 366.7 on page 7 here.

At this point, as the wing slows near the top of the stroke, the underwing pattern appears to match the upper left Pileated picture on page 319 of The Sibley Guide to Birds. In the video, the underwing is mostly white, except for an extensive black tip and what may be a thin black trailing edge. Note that Cornell says "bleeding tends to exaggerate the apparent extent of white in the wings".

The underwing pattern does not seem to match the Ivory-bill underwing pattern drawn by Sibley here. In the video, black coloring covers the entire wingtip, and the black coloring does not extend at all down the length of the underwing, as it should on an IBWO.

Ivory-billed Woodpecker tour solicitation

Here's an interesting post from BIRDCHAT, dated 8/30/05:
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I received a solicitation in my mailbox today from a well-known birding tour company. It offers a 4-day, $1550 "Ivory-billed Woodpecker Tour." Persons who take the tour will stay in "an extremely nice hunting lodge (which normally charges $500 per night)" near Brinkley, Arkansas. They will be fed "high quality, basic food." (Does that mean the bread will be fresh?). The lodge's land holding is said to be "the only private land adjoining the Restricted Zone. In fact, the lodge's lands are bordered by the Bayou de View, very near the point from which the bird was first seen." The solicitation goes on to say, "THE BIRD has been seen once on this property since the announcement." (The solicitation does not make it clear that "THE BIRD" is an Ivory-billed Woodpecker, but why should anyone think otherwise?)

Notwithstanding the high end lodge accommodations, the solicitation goes on to say, "Participants will be taken each day before dawn using 4 wheel-drive vehicle to one of our new blinds or to one of the boats built especially for this tour and will be returned around dark. "

Each participant gets two trips in the boats and two in the blinds.

A day in a boat will not be too different from a day in a blind. The boats will go northeast as far as allowed on the Bayou de View and then "hold position for the day." The blinds are said to be "rain resistant." The boats are "completely camouflaged and weather protected." "Rough sanitation facilities" will be provided with the blinds. "Crude sanitation set-ups" are available on each boat. The 19-foot long, 5-foot wide boats are "mounted with swivel chairs having back rests."

The solicitation contains reassurance that those who tick IBWO right away will not waste the rest of the tour. It says, "Should you see Ivory-billed Woodpecker early in the tour there will be opportunities to bird the 2500 acres of private land or take a guided tour down steam on the Bayou de View."

The solicitation, which altogether is 7 pages long, contains a page each from US Fish & Wildlife Service, The Nature Conservancy and Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Also included is an "Enrollment Form." One page consists entirely of "Special Rules and Regulations." These require participants to:

1. Swear to keep the location secret.
2. Not take GPS equipment outside the lodge.
3. Drink and smoke only in designated areas of the lodge.
4. Use cameras only after all members have seen the bird and then "only without extending lenses beyond the shelter or using flash."
5. "Each group will have a captain to enforce stealthy movement within the blinds, soft voices and restriction to the interior of the shelter." Persons who disobey the rules after warning can lose their payments and not be allowed to return to the field.

From the special rules and regulations page, I also learned the following:

1. The group will be divided into teams of up to 12 persons with each team having a specific site for the day. The accommodations inside each blind are described as "tight quarters."

2. The well-known tour company, which sent the solicitation is not the entity actually conducting the tour. That entity is named "Little Rock Tours, Inc." (I have not heard that name before).

3. Some of the rooms for which the lodge "normally charges $500 per night" are evidently "'dorm' type accommodations." Every attempt will be made to put married couples in a room together, but this cannot be guaranteed.

In contrast to the $1550 package, designated an "Ivory-billed focus trip," the solicitation also offers an "Ivory-billed and other birds" package at the reduced rate of $1295. I'm not sure what the difference is.

I do not quite know how to evaluate the following additional paragraph of the solicitation:

"We definitely hope that you will try to raise some money for The Nature Conservancy beyond that which is included in the trip price. Conversion of the successful hunting lodge into a birding lodge is very much desired. Further, there are needs for additional hunting lands to relieve pressure from the local population to replace areas of the Refuge which are now restricted. Further, we urge you to purchase a Federal Duck Stamp and to bring it with you as an aid in the political struggles."

(How does one handle political struggles while huddling from dawn to dark with 12 people in the tight quarters of a blind? Will there be bubbas with shotguns wandering the 2500 acres who need reassurance that the blind contains NRA-certified good 'ole boys and good 'ole gals who have bought duck stamps?)

I must say this solicitation is very tempting, but I probably won't do it for the following three reasons:

1. I really don't want to bird 2500 acres of Arkansas swampland for three days after I tick IBWO on the first day.

2. In view of the difficulties a Cornell team of 60, spending 14 months in the field, has had getting a satisfactory photo of IBWO, I really don't want to hold off getting a good picture of the bird until all 12 people in my blind say they've seen it. I mean, what do you do if someone keeps saying he/she has not had a good enough look yet?

3. I guess I'm a selfish SOB, but when I pay 1550 bucks to see an IBWO, I want to drink my champagne right away! Making me wait until we get back to the dorm is too much delayed gratification for me!

Bob Fisher
Independence, Missouri
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"Little Rock Tours" is also mentioned here.

Searching the Internet, I also found this by Scott Simon, Director, The Nature Conservancy of Arkansas. Here's a snippet:
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For example, a company called Little Rock Tours put together a four-day itinerary designed to attract birders to Arkansas. The tours, which will debut in December, include two nights at DeGray Lake Resort State Park in Bismarck, where birders will get chances to spot wintering bald eagles, and two nights at Mallard Pointe Lodge and Reserve near Brinkley. Gina Martin, who co-owns Little Rock Tours, said they've booked 10 weeks between December, 2005, and March, 2006, at both lodging establishments. Martin said they've already had several bookings, although the company "hasn't even tapped into the marketing aspects yet." They have a full-page advertisement scheduled to appear in the next issue of Birding Magazine, and they are working with a high-profile birder who says "he can book 1,000 spots with ease."
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If you or someone you know is planning to pay for one of these tours, please email me at tomanelson@mac.com.

Modern, real-world rare bird photos

In some corners of the Internet, people have been castigated for suggesting that we should have some clear photographic proof before declaring that the Ivory-bill lives.

Remember, the late James Tanner said:
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In my own experience, Ivory-bills have not been particularly shy, certainly not noticeably more wary and wild than the Pileated Woodpecker.
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Regardless of a particular bird's wariness, if we glimpse it 8-18 times in a small area and spend tens of thousands of hours trying to refind it, we ought to be able to get a clear photo. In the real word, with other rare species, it happens over and over and over: a rarity is reported, other birders head to the area, relocate it, and get conclusive pictures. Here's one example; many more examples are here.

The Ivory-bill story stands out among all others--for 61 years now, credible Ivory-bill reports have been followed up by diligent searches, and we are now 0-for-61-years in capturing a conclusive photograph. Again, I don't know that the Ivory-bill is extinct, but that seems likely to me.

More detail on the IBWO's noisy flight

Previously, I posted a bit about the Ivory-bill's noisy flight.

Here's some more detail from the late James Tanner, from page 58 of "The Ivory-billed Woodpecker":
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The wing-feathers of Ivory-bills are stiff and hard, thus making their flight noisy. In the initial flight, when the wings are beaten particularly hard, they make quite a loud, wooden, fluttering sound, so much so that I often nicknamed the birds 'wooden-wings'; it is the loudest wing sound I have ever heard from any bird of that size except the grouse. At times when the birds happened to swoop past me, I heard a pronounced swishing whistle.
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I realize that you'd be unlikely to hear a wing sound while glimpsing a bird at 100 meters or so, as in most of the "robust sightings". However, in some cases, the "ivory-bill" flushed at fairly close range. I don't see that anyone ever mentioned hearing this distinctive wing sound. Of course, this is only one of many troubling omissions in Cornell's sight records.

The New York Times backpedals on the Ivory-bill

In an article published 8/30/05, the New York Times does some major backpedaling on the Ivory-billed Woodpecker (IBWO) story. Earlier this month, they were presenting the IBWO's rediscovery as a confirmed fact; now, it seems they are not nearly so sure.

Here are some snippets that stood out for me (I've added the bold for emphasis):
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Although the public mood at the [AOU] presentations ranged from awe-struck to friendly, there was no unanimity about the evidence.
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Does the bird live or does it not?
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Russell A. Charif of the Cornell Lab, who presented the audio recordings of bird calls and rapping on wood in public for the first time here on Wednesday, said, "What we need, what we need is a photo."

And the coming field season is crucial, Mr. Charif said. "It's make or break, I think."

He added, "Right now we're sort of the heroes, but if we come back next year and don't have something, that's going to be awkward."
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On the positive side, the double knocks sounded as an ivory bill should. But there were more before dawn and after sunset than expected from earlier accounts of the bird's behavior and, Mr. Charif said, it was not possible to rule out other sources for the sounds.

"Our interpretation of these data is that they provide suggestive and tantalizing, but not conclusive, new evidence of living ivory bills in this region," he said.
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[Jerome Jackson] concurs with Dr. Prum on the video. He says that witness accounts are not as conclusive as scientific proof, and he is not convinced by the audio recordings.

Dr. Jackson says that a blue jay could possibly have made the calls, something the Cornell Lab agrees with. As for the double knocks, the characteristic communicative rapping on wood of the ivory bill, he said, "I've heard pileated woodpeckers make that kind of sound, I've heard crows make that kind of sound in breaking open a nut."

Several incomplete or inconclusive lines of evidence do not add up to conclusive evidence, Dr. Jackson said, adding, "The bottom line is we simply can't know yet, we don't have the conclusive proof."

There is a lot at stake here. The Department of the Interior earmarked $10 million for preserving the ivory bill's habitat, and some ornithologists say that other species, like the Kirtland's warbler, are losing out as a result.
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Please read the entire article. I believe free registration is required.

A couple of analogies

When assessing the strength of the current evidence that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker survives, I think the following analogies may be helpful:

1. Imagine going to your local records committee and saying you saw a Yellow-headed Blackbird. You only saw it in flight for 2 seconds and you didn’t see the yellow head, but it definitely had white in the wings and you’re 98.5% sure that’s what it was, so they should add it to the state list. No records committee would accept that record, but Cornell calls it a “robust sighting”. Maybe it was there, but there is a chance that it wasn’t.

2. On a dark night, your neighbor records the sound of hoofbeats on the asphalt road in front of his house in New Jersey. You could analyze the sounds and say "These sounds are strikingly similar to the hoofbeats of a zebra, and they are not an exact match to any known recordings of horse hoofbeats". Do you now have some convincing evidence that there was a zebra in the neighborhood?

Skeptical article by Don Hendershot

I think this article, published last May, makes some great points.

Update: Here's another 2002 article by the same author.

Confirmed: Abnormal Pileated in Cache River area

This information from Ken Rosenberg of Cornell is extremely interesting to me:

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2. Upper-wing pattern. A questioner asked Rosenberg (who admitted that he was hoping to time his talk so as not to have to take questions) if members of the search team had observed any Pileated Woodpeckers with aberrant plumage. Rosenberg said that there were reports of such birds, and that he had seen a photograph of a Pileated that was missing upper-wing coverts. The missing feathers exposed more white than usual on the bird’s wing. Rosenberg said that the resulting pattern was not symmetrical, and stressed that he had seen nothing to contradict the team’s conclusion that the Luneau bird’s wing pattern was that of an Ivory-bill.
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This is the first time I've seen public confirmation that there was, in fact, at least one abnormally-plumaged Pileated in the Cache River area. I'm sure that this bird's upperwing pattern didn't exactly match that of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker (IBWO), but given the observers' likely mindset, it could be the source of mis-IDs.

Could a Pileated with abnormal coloring on only one wing pass for "Elvis"? I think so, given that the glimpses were fleeting. Of the seven robust sightings, I think that some observers only saw the pattern on one wing. Others may have seen only one wing well, and assumed that the white pattern on the other wing matched. Remember that this was not a lazily soaring hawk--those wings are flashing awfully quickly.

I think it's likely that the observers had plenty of experience viewing normally-plumaged Pileateds, but that they may have had little or no experience with an abnormal bird. If they glimpsed an oddball Pileated, they would be correct in saying that it "didn't look like a Pileated", and I think their perception of the bird's size and flight style may also be affected. When I look at accounts of the sightings, I don't see that a lot of consideration was given to the possibility of an abnormal Pileated.

Under the hypothesis "Elvis was actually an abnormal Pileated", lots of nagging questions would fall away:

--why four of five key fieldmarks weren't seen (a Pileated doesn't have the white dorsal stripes, the white neck stripe ending before the bill, the longitudinal black stripe on the white wing underside, or the pale bill itself)

--why Elvis was never clearly photographed (maybe it was photographed, but since it was obviously a Pileated, no one realized it was Elvis)

--why no "kent" vocalizations were reported during encounters

--why no one noted the loud wing noise of an IBWO

--why the ARUs did not pick up distinctive double-knocks as described in "The Grail Bird"

--why there was no response to an IBWO tape

--why the sightings were concentrated in such a small range (probably coinciding with an area where an abnormal Pileated was photographed)

--why the bird was present in marginal IBWO habitat (it's good Pileated habitat)

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(Note: I think it's likely that the bird in the Luneau video was an ordinary Pileated.)